Yahoo! Sports Devil Ball Golf blog is counting down the greatest shots from 2011. I’ll tell you a couple of mine.

Friday at the Goodboys Invitational and we’re playing Sagamore Spring G.C. in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. The day is bright, sunny, and warm. The 9th hole is a 210-yard par 3 that requires a 180-yard carry over a large pond. I take out my 5-wood (the club I should have stayed with all weekend, but that’s another story!) and absolutely, positively nut it. It’s a lovely little fade that carries the pond and lands three yards short of the green. I chip to 3 inches of the hole and tap it in for a crowd-pleasing par. I would go on that day to shoot an all-time best round of 94 before imploding under the bone-crushing pressure of a Goodboys weekend the next two days, but the memories of that shot and all the fun I had during that round are precious to me.

Second place goes to the last round I played with a few Goodboys friends at Butternut Farm in Stow, Mass. We were playing #16 – a 173-yard par 3. I took out my 7-wood and again hit it on the screws, a nice draw that perfectly followed the angle of the hole. Even before it landed about 20 feet from the hole “Killer” Kowalski’s totally stoked, saying it was the best shot he’d ever seen me hit. High praise from a discerning Goodboy, indeed.

No, I didn’t make the birdie putt. Yes, I did make my par.

Looking back on the year, I think I made some real progress: a major change in the swing and a bit of a moderation on my course management style provided some highlights, for sure. Out of the ten rounds of golf I played, I broke 100 in three of them, including my lowest round of golf ever (that rocking-chair 94 on the first day of Goodboys weekend) and had a legitimate chance to break 100 on three other occasions. Unfortunately, two of the remaining four rounds were Saturday and Sunday at Goodboys, where the Saturday back and Sunday front really killed me.

Still, it was my most successful golf year thus far, and I’m going into 2012 hopeful that with a few more adjustments I’m working on I’ll keep making sufficient progress to really put it together by Goodboys 2012. I know I need to get more consistent with my short game – my chipping was hit or miss all year, and my putting was atrocious all year long – but that’s kinda difficult when you don’t play much and spend most of your time around the grasses and greens here in Phoenix. Still, on the whole I’d have that while I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made, I need to be ready for the challenge of doing better in 2012.

Now where’d I put that sleeve of orange Wilsons?